Ohio Republican politicians trying to normalize Trump are debasing themselves for all of history

VANDALIA, OHIO -Former U.S. President Donald Trump and Ohio Republican U.S. Senator JD Vance. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images.)

Enough. Enough trying to normalize Donald Trump. Enough giving him cover of respectability. Enough with this pretending from Ohio Republican politicians that he’s not one of the most reckless, unstable, chaotic, dysfunctional, angry, corrupt, fraudulent, egomaniacal, vengeful, solipsistic, mean-spirited, ignorant hucksters to ever darken the American stage — that he is somehow not what the past nine years, more than 30,000 of his lies over the course of his presidency , and thousands upon thousands of news stories have clearly shown him to be.

For the third time now, he’s the Republican Party nominee for President of the United States. But I don’t want to talk about the 2024 Election. I don’t even want to talk about politics.

I want to talk about civilization and what it means to be a decent human being and how the two are intimately connected.

To be civilized means to have an advanced society, but it also means to be a decent person. Humans are social and rational beings by nature. That is precisely how we became civilized. We cooperate. We build trust with one another. We use our reason to fashion tools to be more effective at whatever we’re doing. We work together. We compromise. We play our different parts to serve the greater good for all of us.

Together we figure out math, science, and engineering. We build houses. We build shops. We build ships and sail the ocean. We build schools. We build hospitals. We build bridges. We build everything we see when we step outside our doors and go about our lives. We create art, technology, medicine, music. We create families. We create our own lives to be what they are.

We use our reason and our social nature to do all this. We can build such magnificent things because we know we can magnify our impact working together, so we do. We use our reason and our intellect to figure out how to best do it and how to get along as we do. This is our nature. This is the essence of humankind and it’s why we have on Earth today civilizations so advanced they’d be unfathomable to the vast majority of humans who ever have existed.

Light and dark, up and down, yin and yang: On the polar opposite end of our constructive, social, and reasonable nature is our destructive, antisocial, and unreasonable nature.

We have strong emotions that blind us to our reason. We have tempers. We have passions. We have impulses. We act recklessly without consideration. We fall into dishonesty, selfishness, greed, intolerance, ego, and spite, and do injustice to others. But when we do so, we only debase ourselves. Because it is then that we are failing ourselves. We are failing our own nature, our social and reasonable nature. We are failing that which is beautiful in us as a sacrifice to that which is ugly. Sociopaths make a lifetime habit of this because they don’t feel empathy — they are anti-social.

One of the most prominent hallmarks of the downfalls of civilized societies throughout history is when these ugly impulses take hold and wreak absolute havoc on the lives of others: Caligula, Nero, Commodus, Attila the Hun, Genghis Kahn, Ivan the Terrible, King Leopold II, Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler, one hesitates to begin because one doesn’t know where to stop. In destructive eras of civilization, ugliness reigns: War, famine, desperation, exploitation, corruption, abuse, murder, persecution, and the destruction of all institutions that stand for and represent civilized, lawful society.

In some eras, the fires of destruction quiet to a few crackling embers, and in others they roar into a blazing inferno. To do so, they require oxygen. A lot of oxygen.

Just like hundreds of small decisions by millions of individuals might add up to massive change for the better, the same can be said in the opposite direction. In the former, everyone wants the credit, but in the latter, nobody wants the blame. Though these eras can often be defined by one person, they always have had countless sycophants and enablers providing them oxygen.

So this is what I think about when I see people who ought to know better — who ought to recognize reason and decency and the rule of law and justice and compassion — but instead act on behalf of forces of irrational vengeance, recklessness, lawlessness, chaos, dishonesty and intolerance, cruelty, corruption, division, and destruction.

I’m perplexed by their weakness, when all any of us has to do in this life is set high standards for ourselves in accordance with the true and beautiful and rational and social aspects of our nature, and then not disappoint ourselves. And when we fail ourselves, we learn and grow and return to our better nature.

Easier said than done, of course, but it’s all self-contained; it’s all within ourselves and our own power, to control what we can control, to accept any and all circumstances that might confront us bathed in the reassuring peace that at least we have individually done our best to be our best as a person.

We can withstand anything, knowing the brevity of our time on this Earth — the brevity of everything really, by remembering that we can always strive to maintain our own integrity and perform our duty, and that our endurance and honor itself is a reflection of the best aspects of ourselves. It is us honoring the best in our nature: Our own honesty and dignity and rationality and compassion and conscientiousness for others.

President Donald Trump meeting with governors, including Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images.)

So I strain to understand why Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine supports Trump with the destruction Trump promises to bring to immigrants, to families, to protestors who dare speak out, to the U.S. Department of Justice, and intelligence agencies, and U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and America’s standing in the world on the side of democracy instead of on the side of authoritarian thugs and murderous dictators.

I don’t know why Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost has an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal referring to Trump’s January 6 multiple-felony criminal indictment by a grand jury as “a political weapon” after Trump conspired to overthrow a free and fair American election and rob 7 million Americans of their votes, culminating in a violent mob assault on the U.S. Capitol where the crowd beat police officers, threatened to hang Trump’s own vice president for carrying out his constitutional duty, and stalked the halls of Congress thirsting for blood and carrying zip-ties.

WASHINGTON, DC – JANUARY 06: Rioters enter the Senate Chamber on January 06, 2021 in Washington, DC. Congress held a joint session to ratify President-elect Joe Biden’s 306-232 Electoral College win over Donald Trump. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images).

I don’t know why Ohio Republican U.S. Senate nominee Bernie Moreno, an immigrant, supports the brutality, chaos, and cruelty of militarized mass deportation of undocumented migrants and asylum-seekers, incuding detention camps as outlined by Trump and his allies .

I can’t fathom what is so broken in Trump as a human being to want to treat other human beings like that in the first place, to put already-desperate families and women and children through even more pain, suffering, and terror when so many more reasonable and humane ways of addressing immigration are available. I can’t imagine what’s so broken in some that they would tolerate such abuse of others, much less cheer it on.

I don’t comprehend why Ohio Republican U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance has so thoroughly debased himself from any sense of decency to instead grovel on wretched knees slavering before the throne of power.

I have to accept, as a human being, that this is just their nature. They have made their decisions and they have just as much right to live according to their own nature as I have to live according to mine. Just as the 889,000 Ohio Republicans who voted for Trump in the primary this week have their own right to live according to their nature. As do all the Ohioans who oppose Trump have their right to live according to theirs.

The nature of the universe is constant change, and that plays out both in our lives and in the nature of civilization. Politically in America today, we continue to be in a state of frightful tumult and flux. Nobody knows what’s going to happen next. We have been in a severely abnormal and chaotic state since Trump first rode down the golden escalator in 2015. But some quiet nights I wonder how many more years, how many more decades it might be even, before these particular storms pass. And I wonder what will be left of America in their wake.

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